Performance

Performance

Amy Likar, flute and piccolo, is a San Francisco Bay Area based performing and teaching artist. Equally at home in an orchestra, as a chamber musician or as a soloist, Amy is also a passionate and committed teacher of all ages. As member of the Oakland Symphony, she is committed to the symphony’s mission of classical music for all and mentors for their Music for Excellence Program and advocates for music education on a regular basis.

Amy has been a soloist and guest artist at colleges and universities throughout the United States and Europe and a frequent performer and presenter at conferences and conventions throughout the world.

Amy Likar has been a Powell player for 23 years and is pleased to be a Powell Performing Artist.

Artist Review:
San Francisco Chronicle, March 19, 2016

Rokeach’s concerto was the centerpiece of Friday’s concert by the Oakland Symphony under Music Director Michael Morgan at the Paramount Theatre. It featured a dazzling solo turn by Amy Likar, who sounded entirely in sympathy with the work’s fundamental premises.

In particular, Likar was clearly intent on bringing out the more expressive vein in Rokeach’s writing, and outlining a dramatic relationship between soloist and orchestra that was not quite antagonistic — in the manner of traditional Classical and Romantic concertos — and yet not quite collaborative either.

And in the long-breathed melodies of the slow movement, which Likar delivered with winning tonal beauty and eloquence, you can hear a new kind of character being forged for the piccolo. It’s the kind of thing that instrumentalists all over might undertake.
-Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle

She holds Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees from The Ohio State University and a Bachelor’s in Music Education and Flute Performance from Kent State University. While at Ohio State University, Ms. Likar was the recipient of a Presidential Fellowship and a Graduate Student Alumni Research Award for her DMA document on the history of the New York Woodwind Quintet. In addition in 2000, she was awarded the Peter A. Costanza Award for Outstanding DMA Document. An article from her document was published in the Spring 2005 issue of the Flutist Quarterly. As a teacher at Ohio State, she was awarded the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Associate Award. She has also studied at the Conservatoire National de Nice, France. Her flute teachers include Martha Aarons, Katherine Borst Jones, Randy Hester, Peter Lloyd and Tim Day. In 1991-92, Ms. Likar taught high school English in Swaziland, Southern Africa.

Ms. Likar maintains an active studio and coaches young students to professionals. She works with singers and instrumentalists on enhancing greater freedom and ease both musically and in life.